But there is more, much more to report on BridgeGhazi. Last night, Michael Isikoff reported that the NJ Committee looking into the lane closures on the George Washington Bridge voted to enforce the subpoena for Christie’s Deputy Chief of Staff Bridget (Time for Traffic Problems) Kelly and Christie’s Campaign Manager Bill Stepian. The two could be compelled to submit documents or face charges of contempt.

Additionally, the Committee is planning to issue 18 new subpoenas in the BridgeGhazi scandal.

Recipients include the State Police aviation unit, which oversees Christie’s helicopter travel, four new members of Christie’s office, and his failed state Supreme Court nominee, Phillip Kwon, who now works as deputy general counsel at the Port Authority.

Some of those 18 to be subpoenaed last night or this morning were also subpoenaed earlier in the investigation. According to NJ.com, the list of officials to be subpoenaed is as follows:

Christie is fighting back against some charges against him. Attorney Randy Mastro has made a Open Public Record request for correspondence exchanged between Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer and several other city officials and the New York Times. Zimmer has accused Christie of withholding hurricane Sandy relief funds unless she pushed through a development project for the Rockefeller Group that Christie supported.

If any new developments occur before I roll out of bed, please add them in the comments. Maddow did a great piece on this last night, but it was not available when this post was written. As always, off topic welcome and lurkers are encouraged to join in.

140 Responses to Over Easy: Breaking BridgeGhazi News

Well, well. It would seem that Bridgegate is too narrow a term anymore. That subpoena list goes WAY beyond the lane closures.

So they enforce the subpoena’s. Both those perps take the 5th. Now how do you compel them to surrender private documents under those circumstances? Well, you have to go to a judge who will look at the documents under seal and determine if the 5th applies. That’ll take months, as the perps will fight that as well.

And still nothing has come up directly tying Christie to the planning. We still don’t have anything more than a proffer that Christie knew about the closures as they were happening and the prosecutors are still negotiating that. One side wants immunity, the other a plea bargain for a felony and some jail time.

I hope they took Kelly’s passport. She strikes me as the type who would pack and run.

The RNC still has not found a substitute for Christie in 2016. Trial balloons have been floated for (at least) Jeb Bush, Mitt, Kasich, Walker, and Bloomberg(!). They poll well below both Hillary and Unnamed Democrat.

Boxturtle (Unnamed Republican does better against Hillary than the above)

Good morning, everyone, from…yeah, you guessed it. I am just now watching Rachel Maddow in another tab.

I actually feel a little bit sorry for Bridget Kelly — but only a litte. She is a single mom of 4 kids, has lost her job and isn’t likely to find another for awhile, and has had to hire a very expensive lawyer. And she may have written the “Time for some traffic problems in Ft. Lee” email but she clearly didn’t do it on her own and someone, maybe even Christie, ordered it.

Only -5º here this morning, a forecast of -10º and -15º today and tomorrow. You may be getting the brilliant sunshine we had all day yesterday. Today it’s just gloomy.

I really am of the proverbial two minds about Bridget Kelly. But the Legislative Committee has found the 5th Amendment objections “invalid” which means the refusal to turn anything over may result in prosecution.

And now the Republicans on the committee abstained from a vote on the new subpoenas, so partisanship is once again inevitable.

Legislative Committee has found the 5th Amendment objections “invalid”

Good for them. But somebody needs to remind the legislators that the interpretation of the Constitution is part of the courts function, not theirs. And those perps will trot right across the street to federal court which will promptly issue an injunction and not-so-promptly consider the issues.

The GOP can abstain all they want, IMO it makes them look spineless. It’s the biggest issue to hit NJ in a long time. Either vote no and support your governor, or vote yes and support the law. There ought to be a law of automatic impeachment when a politician tries to have it both ways.

Dunno what the Christie team will do next. Only person who’s been supporting him publicly has been Rudy and he’s been outed as working for the firm behind the development that Christie was pushing in return for Sandy aid.

Wonder if the RGA will ever publicly call for his resignation from that group or if he’ll step down due to the demands on his time from other sources. If he’s still there in 2016, he’ll give the dems a big fat target that can use on almost every GOPer running.

Boxturtle (Credit where due, It seems Christie has covered his connection to bridgegate quite well)

It is interesting, isn’t it, how we sort of fall into certain topics. I was discussing that with my mother, how I sort of lean to environmental/maybe Hanford. It’s difficult to address any topic adequately, given the unwritten word ‘speed limit’ of the blogs, and also, for some of the topics, they are so incredibly already covered, by top-notch investigative journalists. My favorite is Geoffrey Sea, writing for EcoWatch, on the Paducah/Piketon shutdowns.

It is sick, how good this guy is. He makes me never want to type another word about anything nuclear. But then again, he has been living near the Piketon Ohio old plant, and studying Paducah and Piketon, for 30 years, something like that.

That said, I have a semi-solid plan to slam Monsanto up against the wall and knock their teeth halfway down their throat again.

thanks, ysd, just getting up, and it does look as if most of what Christie has stated in his press conference is in the process of being proved false, and he does appear to have a really strange relationship with reality.
Of course, this is the prevalent condition on the right wing. If they went with facts, they couldn’t stay with their ideology, so everything else seems to be the other side of the coin from whatever actually reality would be.

We are on day 5, the state has rested, and it looks like Dunn will testify today, because if he doesn’t he won’t get a self-defense jury instruction. Currently, Judge Healey is looking like he will decline to certify a defense witness as an expert.

I share your concern that some topics I want to write on have already been covered either excellently by others (or ad nauseam by others). That’s why I was so happy to find the Snowden interview I covered last Friday. Still looking for a good item for this week. I usually start drafting early in the week so I have plenty of time for my obsessive editing.

I grew up with ‘y’all’, and do not know that ya’ll is the right way to spell it, but since it’s the spoken word, that could be just a quibble.
‘All stove up’ is a favorite with me, and not having the sense of a wooden duck.

One firepups has done all the outside things before it potentially gets icy here. Walk down the block for the mail, collect all the next door neighbors’ flying styrofoam slabs and put them in my garbage (theirs was catapulting the top slabs around the neighborhood).

Then on to trying to clear some clutter and make breakfast, showering. If there’s no ice, one or two people may be coming over for knitting.

If I’m remembering right, Sea is the fellow who came up with the core samples at Piketon showing how far down the uranium had gone. The Feds tried to confiscate the cores, on the grounds they contained enriched Uranium. I wish i could remember the exact quote from the judge but it was like “Either there is no contamination as your sworn filings to this court have stated, in which case you cannot take the cores. Or there is contamination and this suit should move to settlement talks. Which is it?”

It gets confusing for our US Sen (dumb) Ron Johnson, aka, Rojo the Clown, when a choice needs to be made between supporting US “security,” against the “terrorists,” in defense of “freedom,” and the Republicans still needing to be against everything that is Obomba who also is promoting this so heavily. But, yes, calls are being made. Great reminder.

I called and emailed without going through the link, another “group,” whose mailing/calling list I don’t necessarily want to have to eventually unsubscribe from, or join through using, like FB or Twits.

I have a second Gmail address I use for stuff like this. Every so often I go in and clean it out. It’s all stuff from petitions I’ve signed, etc.

I also run a Firefox add-on that will mask my email with a phony email address, but it still forwards email sent to the masked address to my Gmail inbox, the sender just doesn’t see it. But I don’t usually want the emails so I just use my second Gmail address instead (which I did to sign this petition also).

Was out in the -8F getting some sunshine while there is no significant wind. Two hawks perched high in nearby trees, catching the first warming rays, while obviously near enough to watch for whatever is stirring through the scraps, apple cores, popcorn, bread crumbs on top the compost heap. 14 wild turkeys, beak to tail-feathers, marching down the plowed drive. I toss some garden corn and oats about every other day, not always in the same spot. Free-range walking emergency food reserves should they ever become necessary. ;^)

My teen verbally slapped me down for even considering renewing a brand name anti-virus program, so before the subscription ran out, I made sure MS Security Essentials was up-to-date, uninstalled all of the old program. Leary of any add ons as I don’t have your expertise. Care to share, I always browse with FireFox.

Yes, just heard a bit of coverage with her singing…Still impressive.
Thank you for the gift of the topic….Always a favorite. In case you missed it, he made a trip to Dallas about a week ago. Not well attended,not much coverage that I could tell. The good Gov Perry and the AttyGen, R. likely Gov-candidate did not attend. So sad, Y’all (that I believe is correct; sometimes Y’awl)

My elderly friends would refer to themselves as ‘stove up’ when they weren’t getting out for whatever reason. And here, it’s ‘yins’ often.
Arthritis I hear of by its real name, mostly, but ‘jints’ do get achey.
And does anyone get ‘vapors’ these days?

I use:AdBlock Plus (adblockplus.org) with an additional AdBlock pop-up blocker and an element hiding helperDoNotTrackMe (www.abine.com), also provides masked email optionNoScript (noscript.net), but I turned off some of what it does because it was annoying and cumbersome, but still blocks cross-script from other sites. I need to turn it back on and figure out how to disable specific things, but I have basic protection.

Thanks everyone for the computer protection suggestions, will do. I went on the phone for a bit to several other state congress critters, ALEC legislation coming down fast and furious in the closing weeks of this state legislative session.

You wanted a list of who’s who in Syria, and I responded that its not possible because that would leave the foreigners waging war on Syria no room for makeovers. There is an example of that around minutes 30-35 of this podcast. Trying to make Nusra into moderates. Draitser is wordy but he reads articles with diligence and scours sources that we don’t. The whole section on Syria is worth listening too.

Now that’s an ancient method, using hydrogen gas to strip the protons and accelerate them. It’s exactly the process we used at Argonne to generate neutrons. If we only had the right target…! But then, if we only had the right detector!

OT
I was in another room with rescue beagle, door closed, and he scratched to go out of the room, when spud started playing something on the guitar. Led me into the room where spud was playing, pointed and wagged his tail.
Seriously.

I haven’t seen any problems with it, and no issue with leaving their page. This is from their web page:

What is Tracker Blocking?

Every time you browse the web, hundreds of companies collect, store, and sell info about you based on your browsing history including personal info, articles read, items purchased, videos watched, and much more. Although this data can be used for relatively harmless purposes like targeted ads, it can also influence hiring decisions, credit scores, health insurance eligibility, or facilitate identity theft.

DoNotTrackMe automatically stops this online tracking and allows you to browse the web with peace of mind knowing you’re browsing privately. Plus, it gets rid of annoying targeted ads and pop-ups.

You can view the number and names of companies trying (and failing!) to track you at any site you’re visiting by clicking the blue icon in your toolbar and clicking the red bar at the top that tells you how many trackers are trying to follow you on that site.

Ditto. Best computer suggestions on the internet, right here at Over Easy. My computer was nearly wrecked, I could not type a sentence. Malware Bytes removed more than 1000 bad files. It took more than an hour to check them. And Norton had failed- it is a paid service too, but it failed.

When I grew up, they were still doubting black holes. Quarks were defined as “The dreams that stuff is made of”. A lot of physicists still doubted the last line of the standard model with the Top and bottom quarks.

Now we’re starting to wonder if quarks are really elementary particles. If they ARE, they why do they decay? Preon theory explains that, HOWEVER there’s not yet a shred of evidence to support preons.

Boxturtle (We will eventually discover that the universe is made of duct tape…)

I know, Right? I’ll be happy if any of the Christie staff speaks honestly, but R types tend to be hyperloyal to their own fault or more rarely ubersnakes, so I expect many staffers will sacrifice themselves before they talk.

I did a search for donottrackme and found that FF has it as an add-on, which, for the most part, do work well. The feedback, especially from very recent posters (Jan 2014) have some real criticisms of current updates which when responded to by the abine support, seem to indicate it’s an either/or situation: tolerate the intrusions or lose the safety.

What is also interesting is when I clicked the ad-on install, FF had a warning message!

Yep, and the reason to be an avid reader of this stuff. Unfortunately, getting into the meat requires some pretty good understanding of the math, which,in turn, requires one to be steeped in the buildup to the current mathematical reasoning. So, Symmetry is a good alternative, if you don’t mind the comic characters! (ugh!)

“There are only two religions in the universe. The first believes that the universe will be destroyed and replaced with something even stranger. The second believes this has already happened” – Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

I spoke with them and they acknowledged the stuck loop in exiting their site. No help but the person with whom I spoke said the engineers will look at it. But as it stands, if I want to get Google (or any other site not tabbed)’ I either open a new browser, add a tab to the current one or exit FF entirely and start over.

One of the utilities used to do this after paying the bill. Really obnoxious!

As for the critiques on FF, abine maintains that the new capabilities transformed the app from passive to active, and if one wishes not to see the popups, disabling them returns the system to passive.

Do you notice any differences in the past couple of months? If the old passive system works, then perhaps that is sufficient.

Hey, Craney, I was watching Dunn’s testimony on CNN … oh and it’s on again … not sure what to make of it, yet. Except … can you really buld a defense on “assumptions” of threats that were never there??? Rhetorical question. Watching along with you guys when I can.

My brother had my mother’s console piano and we had a blonde cocker spaniel (sweet, sweet breed). The dog would howl along when my brother played. He had made some “creative” modifications to the hammers so it was hard to say what the dog thought. Everyone had fun. My cats have always been fascinated by the piano I inherited, played and just sitting there, no matter. :-)

Depends on your definition of broke. If one needs Win 7 instead of XP, is XP broke?

When I worked on the overclocking utility, it became transformative from an essentially passive operation(open BIOS. Tweak settings. Watch for the smell of burning rubber!) to active. The system had it’s own “sniffer”, but one did get some messages along the way not seen in the older method of OC. So one has to decide one way or another.

Don’t OC
Use the Utility and don’t complain!
Use the old method and take more chances.

Playing guitar to the cows was a big part of the trail drives, kept them peaceful.
Some one suggested the beagle took me to spud to make him stop playing.
But there’s always some one wanting to see a downside to things.
MO loves his peoples.

Hear, hear. But there’s a lot of ignorance and stupidity out there too. I am getting to the point I won’t bother with anything that doesn’t work well, IS NOT annoying, AND is well designed. Such a pleasure when you find it. And malpractice in a tech company’s offerings. Unless of course malpractice is their offering as you suggest.

I recently saw a case where the business model, branding, and marketing were at exact odds with the software developed … by the same team! That was part of the problem, the too small development team was running the “marketing” effort based on stuff they didn’t understand. So they made claims for the software that even their interactions didn’t bear out. Not suggesting that’s the case with the software you cite. It’s just never a straight line and it should be. Just another of my pet peeves.

Activism nag. This is The Day We Fight Back against NSA mass surveillance without cause. Time for Congress critter calls to both parties. The capture of the Congressional intelligence committees by the agencies they are supposed to oversee is unacceptable.

Have fun with the Congressional staffs. (And put in an extra plug against the TPP, which is obliquely related to this issue.)

I was brought up on the lone Ranger, Gene and Roy, not to mention Hopalong.

The info about singing to herds is well documented. The last thing a cowboy wants on the trail is a stampede at night, hence the “singing”.

I guess that cows aren’t music critics like dogs and cats!

Much of what passes for legends have a basis in fact. The western hat is another one of those.

“Stetson created a rugged hat for himself made from thick beaver felt while panning for gold in Colorado. According to legend, Stetson invented the hat while on a hunting trip while showing his companions how he could make cloth out of fur without tanning.[2][3] Fur-felt hats are lighter, they maintain their shape, and withstand weather and renovation better.[4]

Stetson made an unusually large hat from felt he made from hides collected on the trip, and wore the hat for the remainder of the expedition. Although initially worn as a joke, Stetson soon grew fond of the hat for its ability to protect him from the elements. It had a wide brim, a high crown to keep an insulating pocket of air on the head, and was used to carry water.

As their travels continued, a cowboy is said to have seen J.B. Stetson and his unusual hat, rode up, tried the hat on for himself, and paid Stetson for it with a five dollar gold piece, riding off with the first western Stetson hat on his head.”

One interesting note, Mastro claims to be conducting a good-faith internal investigation to help Christie’s office clarify what his people have been up to. This is happening because, of course, Christie himself knows nothing about it and needs an internal investigation to get answers.

Sure, it certainly looks like he’s trolling for dirt Christie can use to politically attack Zimmerman … but that’s his official cover.

And the Cisco Kid! Though I don’t remember Cisco singing.
Hey, they all sang because cowboys sing, I guess.
Wonderful story about the hat. One thing learned on a Habitat build, without a wide brim you can’t stay out in the sun without really hurting your ears and neck. I’m sure St. Stetson was owed a bunch of thanks by all of us.
Bandanas also were a real need, to keep from choking in windstorms, wipe off the sweat, and as I have been told, a washcloth to use in those washpans outside the barn door.

I think possibly overcaution. I haven’t had any problems with it and I feel marginally safer running it. As for AdBlock Plus, I have a “thing” about ads (my kids think I’m nuts). I block them everywhere I can. AdBlock Plus even blocks (mostly) ads that run between segments on shows like Rachel Maddow or All In. And it lets me select ads displayed on the sidebar or between the post and the comments on sites like Esquire (Charlie Pierce’s Politics blog), and those annoying banners that drop down from the top or slide out from the side on some websites. If they annoy me, whammo!

Nope, I don’t notice anything different. But then (oddly considering I’m a retired techie) I tend to use just what I need and not explore the other features much. So maybe I’m not seeing some stuff they added. I suppose I should poke around.

Kind of jumping in at the end here, so I may be misunderstanding the issue being discussed … but I *think* the deal is that Abine is trying to go head-to-head with Ghostery.

One of the reasons that I prefer Ghostery is because it actively provides a list of trackers detected on every page and allows enabling/disabling each on a site by site basis. Not too long ago, the Don’t Track Me plugin would just quietly run in the background blocking everything in it’s list. If what I’m seeing here is correct, newer versions are trying to provide a more interactive/granular experience to compete with Ghostery.

IMO, Ghostery has always been a better product – the directly-linked tracker info database makes it really easy to get basic info about where a tracker came from, find corporate information about it’s producer, access the related privacy policies, etc. They do other cool stuff too.

I haven’t run Ghostery, so I can’t compare, but I can click on a DNTMe button in the toolbar and see a list of companies I’ve blocked. The first 20 or so all have “Ad” in their name. Some have hotlinks to Abine’s description of the company and what they do. Many have recognizable names. I’m sure all are Googleable.

Perhaps they provide similar functionality in a somewhat different fashion? I’m happy enough with DNTMe to not switch to Ghostery, but I suppose if I were starting from nothing I would consider it.

I think it somewhat depends on the way the site embeds the ads. I watch everything online (no cable, no TV antenna, no TV) and I almost never see ads in anything. When I do it’s not one of my “regular” shows and I assume they embed their ads differently. But they’re never the same ads one sees on commmercial TV.

DNT provides a master list of trackers blocked, yes, that’s what I remember too. Does the updated version provide a real-time list of trackers on each page and the easy ability to control on a site-by-site (or url-by-url) basis which ones are allowed and which are blocked yet?

I haven’t done a comparison in several moons now, but last I checked it was possible to shape your third-party collection profiles with Ghostery in ways that simply aren’t possible with the Abine product. DNT can block it … Ghostery can feed it with only the information *I* want it to collect (which, granted, is usually “none”). The implications of being able to establish a degree of control over the raw inputs being processed by “big data” are kind of exciting … and potentially quite subversive.

I wasn’t suggesting you switch, you clearly have your own approaches already established based on a degree of knowledge … I was suggesting Starbuck try it as an alternative that I personally prefer as a way to achieve the functionality and avoid apparent difficulties between their chosen browser and the DNT product.

Also, the point of the tracker database is you don’t *have* to futz with a search engine … the primary relevant info and links are all right there. You describe exactly why the feature is cool.

Ghostery doesn’t allow control over what data a tracker sends or anything. It just lets you pick which sites you appear on and which ones you don’t … but that can be powerful.

For example, leaving (some of) the trackers on while you browse professional web sites while blocking all of them when you visit political ones can create an active yet fully apolitical big-data profile … while just blocking them all becomes quickly apparent (assuming one ever directly visits google(youtube)/facebook/etc where the activity collection is legit and *always* master-linked – and sold between players). The best way I can think of to put it is, to some extent, one can become conspicuous in their invisibility … if the desire is to become big-data transparent.

I start feeling sorry for bridget kelly then I remember her saying, after hearing that other people’s kids were stuck on the bridge for 5 hours on the first 4 days of school, ” is it wrong that I am smiling? ”

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